AFTER THE TSUNAMI – HARNESSING AUSTRALIAN EXPERTISE FOR RECOVERY
Canberra, 31 March 2005
Progress in the Maldives and global coral reef recovery
Dr Tony Haymet, Chief, CSIRO Marine Research and
Dr Charlie Veron, Australian Institute of Marine Science
Tony Haymet
Powerpoint presentation (18,806KB)
Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, John. It is my pleasure to report on a completed piece of work, and I should emphasise this was very much the initiative of the Prime Minister. I understand he met the President of the Maldives at the Jakarta meeting; the Prime Minister’s Office called Geoff Garrett; Geoff Garrett called me at 6 o’clock in the morning and within a couple of days we had a scientific team assembled, using Australia’s great coral reef expertise from Townsville.
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Let me take you through some of these results and indicate that we are working through the issues of trying to do the same thing in the Seychelles right now.
Submarine topography
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For those of you who, like me, haven’t been to these islands: they are pinnacles. The scale here, although you can’t read it, is about 5,000 metres depth. They are pinnacles that rise up from the ocean floor and are a metre or two above the surface – more on that later. Due to the request from the President of the Maldives, a rapid assessment team of multiskilled scientist/divers went to the Maldives in early February and have completed their report. Their report is on the AusAID web site.
The Maldives
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This is looking from the south to the north of these pinnacles pointing out of the ocean.
The survey had two goals. One was to assess the health of the coral reefs, and we have a number of experts in coral reefs here for the discussion sessions. There was also a question about the fisheries. Obviously, the biggest industry in the Maldives is the tourist industry; after that, the tuna industry is quite important and also a very important source of protein. And the baitfish for that fishery are the fish that live around the coral reefs.
This Australian team was able to form four teams, three on Safari Boats and one in the lagoons, to assess the reefs.
I guess the crucial fact about the Maldives is that about 98 per cent of the coral was wiped out in the 1998 coral bleaching event, and so what is happening now is that there is a regrowth going on. My understanding is that this tsunami has set back that regrowth by some years.
We have a poster outside, if you would like to read the conclusions of this study there. The good news is that the fishery doesn’t seem to have been affected by this tsunami.
Manta (surface) surveys and dive surveys (10 m)
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This is the kind of work that is going on in the Great Barrier Reef biodiversity survey. This would be done by automated stereo cameras, in collaboration with all of the partners. It is done by eye – people trying to remember what they see in each dive, and then writing it down quickly when they get to the surface.
Baitfish populations
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Extensive surveys of the reef and lagoon fishes revealed there was no concern for the baitfish or the tuna fisheries.
Reef and island geomorphology
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I think there are a couple of impressions that were left with all the team, if I could report it on their behalf. The first is the different kind of trauma that the local people felt. There was no breaking wave such as you saw in the videos in Thailand. This was an inexorable rise of the sea, and all of the firsthand reports are the same, that people felt the islands were sinking. With no point of reference, there was just an inexorable rise of the water that occurred from east to west, and you see some of that occurring here [in slide].
I think that also explains a lot of the damage of the island, which was undermining the foundation of buildings. Many of the buildings were built in an era when destruction of the coral reef to create building materials was even more common than it is today, and this inexorable flow of water, not unlike those floods you see in the alps of Italy every couple of years, undermined the edges of the buildings. So I think that was the first impression that people came away with.
The second is that by the time this assessment team arrived, in early February, there were quite a number of nations and NGOs on the ground, many of them with the capability of building schools and hospitals, and the local inhabitants were noting even in early February that there was no assistance available for their personal reconstruction of their own homes.
I think this was a piece of good news for Australia: it was a mission successfully accomplished on direct request of the President of the Maldives. A report has been written, there are a number of positive suggestions that you can read (www.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pdf/maldives_reef_report.pdf). The Australian scientists were very impressed by a number of the Maldives researchers, but quite distressed by the lack of depth in the number of people that were available to assist over a large number of islands. So I think there are some opportunities for capacity-building there.
And again something about the large number of nations and NGOs that were present, even in early February.
Warning system: Moorings, argo floats, XBT lines, surface drifters, tide gauges
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Just to switch gears here a little bit, I would like to take just a minute to talk about oceanographic studies of the Indian Ocean. There are at least three reasons why we need to study the Indian Ocean. One of course is the second half of the tsunami warning system. As Phil [Cummins] said, the first task is to detect these seismological events, but I think it is fair to say at the moment we have no way of knowing which ones are going to generate tsunamis – and the ones that do generate tsunamis, we don’t know at what magnitude they are going to be generated. So that requires observations. We certainly don’t have enough satellite altimeters flying at the moment, and they seem to be decreasing in number. We don’t have enough satellites flying at the moment to do this remotely, so we need to be in the Indian Ocean with measuring devices. It is possible to deploy buoys today that would do that job effectively. So that’s the first of the three reasons.
The second reason is the one that has been of most concern to scientists over the last few years – that is, the tidal surges generated by monsoon events. As indelicate as it may be to say, that is the principal cause of loss of life in the Indian Ocean, notwithstanding the tsunamis. Bangladesh and other nations are greatly affected by these tidal surges. So, again, understanding and monitoring these monsoon-related events is a crucial part of understanding the Indian Ocean.
The third reason is for climate change. The Indian Ocean lacks the kind of regular array of monitoring devices we have in the Pacific, which we use to measure El Niņo. And so for many years the International Oceanographic Commission and the Indian Ocean GOOS, the Global Ocean Observing System, have been discussing such an array as is portrayed here.
Just to give you an idea of the research aspect and some of the Australian involvement here: it has been traditional in oceanography to have this kind of a regular rectangular array, but of course these days you can turn this problem around and say, ‘What’s the most effective arrangement of monitoring devices in order to figure out what is going on in the Indian Ocean?’
Observing system design: Tropical Indian Ocean mooring array
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On the left-hand side you see the kind of standard rectangular array that would be routine in oceanography today. If you actually do the optimisation problem, you get something like what is on the right-hand side. I invite you, next time you are in the bath, to make a few tidal waves in your bath and you will see that monitoring what happens at the edges of the basin gives you more information about what is happening in the middle.
So, in some respects, it is a humbling situation to be in. We know very little about the Indian Ocean. For example, the 2003 JAMSTEC Mirai cruise, the sister agency in Japan, was one of the very few transects of the Indian Ocean at 30°S. There are two Japanese buoys around the Equator, and apart from that we are just reliant on the odd expedition that is going across the Indian Ocean. So certainly food for thought for Australia and the other neighbours in the periphery.
With that I will stop and hand over to Charlie.
Charlie Veron
Powerpoint presentation (2,669KB)
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I was going to start my few brief comments today by saying that staff from AIMS have worked in all the countries that have been impacted by the tsunami. But from what Phil [Cummins] said, it has gone all around the world, so I had better change my opening comments somewhat.
We have worked, over a very long period of time, in all the countries that have actually received a lot of damage from the tsunami. Some of us now have been back, as Tony just talked about, to the Maldives, we have got some staff in India at the moment, I am going to Thailand in two weeks, and a lot of this work is aimed at assessing what the actual effects of the tsunami have been.
There are two completely different things. One is the effect of the tsunami on coral reefs, and the other is the effect of tsunami on humans via the coral reefs. As you probably know, coral reefs are tremendously important for the subsistence life of an awful lot of people throughout the Indian Ocean area. Even more so, coral reefs are tremendously important for the tourist industry throughout the whole area. I am quite dreading going to Phuket and the islands off Phuket in two weeks on a big boat that is crawling with syndicated press people – cameramen and so on – because the emphasis is going to be to try to put a light sheen on the whole thing and say, ‘Well, it really wasn’t too bad after all. Tourists, keep on coming.’ But I know already that that has certainly not been the case.
The reefs that we have seen so far are not going to even start recovering for another 10 years or so. In 10 years maybe they will start to look a bit like coral reefs, and that will depend very much on how these reefs are managed. Now, I have seen reefs in Indonesia that have been damaged by earthquakes, and what happens then is that the people who live off the reefs starve, they start explosive fishing, that damages the reefs further, and reefs that have been damaged by earthquakes 30 years ago have not recovered at all – they show no sign of recovery. These are areas where there have been quite big tourist infrastructures in place, and they have just fallen apart.
So what is going to be the challenge is to try to get a bit of confidence back in the tourist industry, to bring money back into these countries that have depended on it so much as their major source of income.
I have got a couple of pictures of what I am talking about.
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This is an ordinary standard coral reef such as the tourists come to have a look at. Similar reefs occur right around the tropical Indo-Pacific area.
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This is one of my favourite reefs. It was quite badly damaged by the tsunami.
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You have all seen pictures of pretty coral reefs like that, and this is what people pay a lot of money to come and see.
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The Maldives, where Tony was talking about: as you know, the Maldives are only just above the waterline, they haven’t got much freeboard. That is showing the highest point of the Maldives, which is actually a human-made rubble heap.
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Underwater the situation now is quite grim in most places, where there has been a tremendous amount of movement of rubble and the corals have been overturned. In fact, this picture shows the corals have been overturned more than once, so there has been some event at some previous time. Some of these corals are about 200 years old, so we are probably looking at events that have occurred before recorded history.
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The damaging thing for coral reefs throughout this whole area occurs when you get a whole lot of very soft sediment. Corals deal quite well with most things but they don’t do very well at all with soft sediment, and so this is one of the problems now.
I won’t show too many more of these. This is the Maldives.
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Lots of unfortunate pictures like that. I won’t go on about it.
At the Seychelles, a tremendous amount of this sort of damage was done in the limestone reefs, as opposed to the granite islands. The granite islands were hardly affected at all; the limestone reefs were very badly affected. These are the pretty reefs, and it just so happens that these are the reefs that have been damaged so badly by so-called coral bleaching in response to El Niņo warm pools moving across the equatorial region.
In Thailand the effects have been very, very variable, and in Indonesia we largely don’t know what the effects on the coral reefs are. They are the least known of all, but we assume that the coral reefs in southern Sumatra, at least, have been very, very badly damaged indeed.
So it has been a very patchy effect, and it is one that we are going to have to just live with. It is going to be, maybe, repeated again, maybe worse, maybe not as bad, but it is going to be repeated again and it is going to impact very, very heavily on the income of these local people.
Questions/discussion
Bobby Cerini – This is a question about the communication of what is happening scientifically. I know Hugh [Davies] referred to this in his talk, and also Phil [Cummins] touched on it. Obviously, there are livelihoods at stake here, there is the confusion and the panic that still must remain after the tsunami events. How do we make sure that we are communicating to people what is happening? How do we make sure that the methods we are using to communicate to them are the best? Is there any research going on into the most effective methods for communicating to people? I am talking here about the scientists and those who are working on the ground as experts being able to get their message across to allay some of the fears and the panic.
Charlie Veron – One thing that has happened that has been very unfortunate is that a lot of rubbish has been publicised about the research, at any rate. The rubbish has been from conservationists who say, ‘If they looked after the reefs in the first place, the reefs would have protected the land from the tsunami.’ That is just not true. That is very, very widely publicised amongst conservation organisations. What we are doing now is having a lot of journalists on a great big ship that has been hired for this purpose; the results are going to be syndicated everywhere. But it is really a case of scientists leading the information flow, rather than a lot of the non-information that has been out and about now.
Bobby Cerini – Could I possibly suggest, as an addition to that, that within Australia we have got a huge amount of expertise in science communication and in assisting scientists to communicate the messages clearly, and in getting those messages out effectively to public audiences. Perhaps that is something we can address in the workshop later today, in some of the sessions.
Charlie Veron – Good idea, yes. They’ll take you up on that. Thanks.